TO STAND IN THE WIND
I Samuel 1:1-18, Luke 9:37-43, John 3:1-10
[Since spoken communication differs from written, some of the grammar and syntax of this transcript may seem awkward in written form. To keep integrity with the spirit of the original delivery, the transcript stays close to the exact words spoken.]
As Hannah sat listening to the prayers that Sunday, she realized that she had wrapped her arm around the post she was sitting next to, almost hugging it. The old church reminded her of Fenway Park. She was new to the church, had been coming about two months, since she got pregnant. She was scoping out a place to baptize the baby when it came. If it came, she kept reminding herself. And she found that if you didn't get to church early enough, you might find yourself in a seat with a view obstructed by one of the columns holding up the balcony. "An historic church, living in the present" the tagline of the church said. And one of the wonderful things about being there was the feeling of "old," as if the pilgrims themselves would swing open the door to the pew next to you and sit down.
But she caught herself at that moment--realized how odd it was that she held the old wooden column in a kind of strange embrace, as if she were holding onto some proxy of what was absent. Her husband Rick was absent. His way of dealing with grief was certainly not to go to church. He was drinking beer and getting ready to watch the U.S. Open. He'd bought a 12-pack of Coronas from Joe Canals the night before, and began working on it around 9:00 p.m.
She sat there and hugged that wooden column, imagining for a moment it was the hollow embrace of an absent God. Everyone was bowing their heads, praying, and she was relieved that people might not notice her strange clinging to the church's substructure. So she inclined her head upon it; leaned on it; embraced it. She closed her eyes and rested a moment. Suddenly, a hymn from childhood, from Methodist summer camp, popped into her head. Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms....
Her belly still felt as if a tiny glass had broken inside of her. She thought of that ritual at a Jewish wedding, where they break a glass inside a napkin. There in church, she felt like the anti-Mary, a receptacle for broken glass.
The preacher, at the beginning of the service, had welcomed everyone as he always did. He said, as he always said each Sunday, "How good it is for us to be together." That Sunday Hannah had a hard time hearing any sentence with the word "good" in it. He had explained that there were blue prayer cards in the little rack in front of you, that you could write your prayer on and it would be offered by the deacons, by the Prayer Team, around the piano. The whole thing seemed a tad quaint to her. She hadn't really known what to think about prayer. There was a small part of her that thought of prayer as sort of an adult version of offering a wish list for Santa. And yet she remembered her chaplain at college, one of the coolest women she had ever met, Reverend Angela. She'd become a friend to her. She was the one person who listened to her, really listened to her, when she had that crisis with her boyfriend. It was so odd to hear someone as well-educated as she saying to her, "I'll pray for you." And she knew that she meant it. She was sure that Angela knew what prayer was, even thought she didn't. And somehow she could feel, in her bones, that it made some difference, though she didn't understand what.
So Hannah took out one of the blue prayer cards from the little rack, and with the cheap Bic pen provided there, she wrote in large letters, "THREE MISCARRIAGES." No name, just those two angry words. Leaning, leaning.... She sung it in her mind as the plate came by and she put the card in, not sure what good it would do. Leaning on the everlasting arms....
What good would it do? I guess that's the money question in this series of sermons, as we explore what prayer is...the question: What good is prayer? This figure that I created for you this morning, Hannah, sort of based roughly on the biblical character that Tracey read about in that story from 1st Samuel...of course she is a fictional character, but I hope she stands in this morning for any who might have come bearing a burden. And I know that there are many who have come together today bearing some kind of burden; some are here hoping that something in your life might change. I come here today with things I want to change, I want to be different. And I have that same question: What is my prayer going to matter? Will it make a difference that I lift up to God my deepest desire and yearning?
That's what we were exploring last week; I was asserting that one way of approaching prayer, one way to understand it, is to understand prayer simply as asking, lifting up our desires and yearnings to God. That is where the rubber hits the road. But we sort of left a question mark standing there on this question: Does it change God when we pray? There are some Christian thinkers--Kierkegaard for one (I know I'm very fond of mentioning him), who believes that prayer does not change God, it changes us. He's famous for saying that...that prayer does not so much change God as it changes us. And yet, as I was implying last week in our exploration of the scripture lessons that were read, the current of biblical thought points us to the notion that our prayers do change God; that the human encounter with God somehow changes God, as paradoxical as that might seem.
As we were hearing from Matthew's sermon on the mount last week, we are encouraged not to pray timidly, but to be bold in our praying. To ask; to seek; to knock. And in doing that, we don't address a brick wall. We don't address an "other" who is not responsive to us. I'm sure there's a DSM-IV code for people who do that--for people who address another who is incapable of responding. It would be strange if we were to approach a God who was somehow unable to respond to our very human requests and yearnings.
Richard J. Foster in his book Celebration of Discipline, which is a great book--it's something of a classic by now--writes in that book, "It is stoicism that demands a fixed universe, not the Bible." And he speaks about how people in the Bible we see praying, pray as if their prayers matter. Paul announces in his letters that we are co-laborers with God. And it is a most remarkable thing, I think, that the writer of John's gospel records these words emanating from Jesus' mouth: Jesus says, "If you abide in me and my words abide in you, then ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you." Have you heard those words before? Are they not astonishing?
Of course we do well to pay attention to the beginning of that sentence, "If you abide in me and my words abide in you, then..." there is a bit of a conditionality in that sentence, isn't there? If...then. In other words, if the power of Christ somehow resides in us, we ourselves can be channels and vehicles for the very power of God. That's an astonishing thing. That we can somehow be vehicles for divine Grace. Fragile vessels containing that most precious substance, God's love; as Paul speaks about it, we are fragile earthen vessels created in order to be filled with the love of Christ. We can be channels for that ever flowing love, beacons; receivers of it. And of course, what's our job but to tune in to that frequency, to use a very rough metaphor. For us to be "receivers" of that Grace, our task is to "tune in" to the God channel, as it were.
I'll give you my own personal confession about prayer. I believe that prayer is powerful, and it matters. I believe in fact that it can change the universe. But I confess that I don't know how it works. We can't study it scientifically, even though science has sought to study prayer scientifically. But I think that's a wrong approach. It's mixing apples and oranges to do that. Because prayer is not some technique that we can control, that works according to the principles of cause and effect. If we treat it that way, it then becomes yet another idol with which we can try to control and manipulate the universe. To say that prayer changes the universe, doesn't imply that we can control the outcome.
Many years ago I traveled to the remote island in the western part of Scotland called Iona, in the Hebrides. I know some of you have also made your way to that place--it's a place of pilgrimage for many people. And the folks who founded the island and community of Iona are not monastic people in residence, they're sort of monastic folk in diaspora. But they've founded a rich worship life there that continues every week among those who visit. And every day there's a different worship service.
When I was there, one of the services I participated in was a service of healing. And the worship leader explained to us how that service came to be. He said that as they were beginning to put together their worship life, they thought, "Let's just try a healing service. It's an ancient tradition of the church--let's give it a shot." And they did what they do every week during that service at Iona--they wrote their prayers for healing on a little piece of paper and they created a ritual, similar to the ancient ritual. And they lifted up their prayers for healing, for others and for themselves, and they found that people got healed--some. Some of them quite miraculously. They didn't understand how that happened, it just happened. And so they looked at the scriptures and they found how, hey, that's a pretty biblical practice--to pray in faith that our prayers matter toward the healing of other human beings. As we can be channels for God's grace, for each other, we can be conduits, so to speak, for that healing.
I often wish we could do that kind of practice here. In Palo Alto, when someone had something happen in their life, in which they found themselves sick, diagnosed with cancer for example, we sometimes would create a healing service for them, and surround them with our prayers. And it mattered!
But it's important to note, as we look at when people are healed; as we look at those healing stories in the Bible that occur so frequently--I read to you one from Luke today--that the miracle part that we encounter, the miraculous part, it's not an end in itself. It's not simply spiritual pyrotechnics to wow us. The purpose of those healing miracles we encounter in the New Testament are simply meant to be an outward sign of an inward transformation. The real miracle in those stories is a human being transformed. The healing part simply signals what has happened to a whole person--and what has happened to them on the inside through their encounter with Jesus Christ.
Many of you in your reflection about prayer--and you have an insert in your bulletin today again, if you didn't get a chance to reflect on this question, "What is prayer?" I'd invite you to do that; I think it's a green insert. And you have the responses that others wrote last week....But many of you described experiences with prayer that were, in some sense, quite miraculous. And I say, "Thanks be to God" for them. But it's also important to say, "We don't know how all that happens." Because here's the tricky thing. Maybe it's the elephant in the room. Let's say we pray with boldness. We ask; we seek; we knock; we pray for a miracle; and what if it doesn't happen? We pray for someone in our life to be healed; we pray, if we can't have children, for a child. That is what Hannah yearns for...for a child. What if we pray, and what we pray for doesn't happen?
I think it's hard to understand how this whole prayer thing works. And I think trying to understand it, or pin it down, is sort of like trying to nail the wind to the wall. And I'd suggest that we do well not so much to try to understand it, as to stand under it. Or maybe a better way to put it is: to stand in it. To stand in that power that we connect to when we pray. So let me suggest a metaphor that's been helpful to me as I've sought to think about prayer, if not to try to understand it. I believe that the power of prayer is rather like standing in the wind. Maybe that's an apt metaphor, because the wind, the ruah in Hebrew, or the pneuma in Greek, is a symbol for the Holy Spirit, that engine of God's imminent power that works among us to transform human beings.
Prayer is like standing in the wind. And it's a good metaphor because we know we can't control the wind. As Jesus says to Nicodemus in John 3, "We don't know where it's coming from, and we don't know where it's going." In other words, it's a mystery whose functioning we can't explain; all we can do is feel the effects of it. We see the leaves rustle; we feel its cooling breeze; we see sometimes its destructive power, as those who've witnessed New Orleans can tell us about. To stand in the wind, and to experience the transforming power of the Spirit that flows through us. Perhaps that's a good metaphor for how prayer works.
Before I end this morning--if you can hang with me a few more moments--a quick postscript on Hannah's story. The Hannah that was sitting in worship with you today. As I said, of course a fictional character, but in many ways, Hannah describes my own family's experience; my wife Catherine's experience. Catherine had three miscarriages before we had our son, Will. I had given up, at one point in my life, on having a child. And I have to say that that was one of the most difficult times spiritually in my life. And I know that there are people here today struggling with that. If not personally, you know someone who is struggling with the spiritual odyssey that is infertility. And let me tell you, the one thing that was the hardest to hear--I know people said it with a kind heart, but--was, when we were trying to get pregnant again, "Just relax." And those of you that are in this odyssey know what a mind-bender that is. You know...I am relaxed!! But you know, what happened to me in the midst of that time, to us--our third miscarriage happened during Hurricane Mitch. And we can get into this game where we compare our pain to others, and say, "My pain doesn't matter in comparison to that great pain." But what it did for me, in breaking my heart open at that time in my life, it connected me to other people's pain. It opened me to how other people feel in such circumstances. And in the midst of that, through a lot of prayer and pretty much literally going to my knees, I did discover what we hope Hannah in the biblical story, and in this story, discovered: the embrace of God. The embrace of God. And I don't know what that changes, but it changes something. It changes everything.
I ended the story of Hannah in 1st Samuel before the result of her prayer. She did get a baby, and she dedicated it to God. But the story ended on the line, "Her countenance was no longer sad." Because I think what really matters was the transformation that happened in her life, in her encountering the embrace and the transforming love of God.
Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms. Amen.
June 17, 2007
Jeff Vamos
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